Experiences monitoring and managing QoS using SDN on testbeds supporting different innovation stages

In recent years there has been a big increase in the number of network-related experiments using software defined networking (SDN) technology. We report on our practical experience over 2 years running network experiments on three classes of testbed facility, each supporting researchers working at a different innovation stage. We run experiments using the commercial Amazon EC2 cloud facility, pre-commercial federated testbed of FIWARE Lab instances and the OFELIA experimental facility. We run an idealized common network experiment on each testbed, reducing its scope where needed to match testbed capabilities, and report details of the practical experience gained using a set of qualitative metrics for direct comparison across classes of testbed. We conclude with a concrete recommendation for pre-commercial testbed facilities to allow better support for network experiments in the future.